04/21/09 – Sauvik Chakraverti – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Now we're going to go ahead and go to our next guest.
I was fooling around on Facebook yesterday and got into an interesting conversation about anarcho-capitalism with a young man, a young Indian guy.
And I asked him, hey, who's the best guy you think to interview about Indian politics?
There's all these elections going on now on the subcontinent and one of the most populous nations on the earth.
Of course, everybody says a rising power and there's all kinds of interesting things to discuss with regards to India.
And he recommended to me a guy named Salvik Chakravarti from Goa, India.
And his blog is called Antidote.
That's also the name of his book, Antidote, Essays Against the Socialist Indian State.
The blog is at Salvik, that's S-A-U-V-I-K dash antidote dot blogspot dot com.
Very interesting stuff.
Welcome to the show, sir.
How are you today?
Thank you.
Great to be here.
It's great to have you on the show.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
So I was explaining to the people that you are the author of the book Antidote, Essays Against the Socialist Indian State.
And another one is called Free Your Mind, A Beginner's Guide to Political Economy.
You write for the Economic Times.
And I was telling the audience there a minute ago that I was talking with a Facebook friend and he recommended you as the best expert to talk about the elections going on right now in India.
And I pulled up your page and there's a big pot leaf and a bunch of Ludwig von Mises.
And I decided I thought I found my guy.
Thank you.
Okay, so who's who in the Indian elections?
What's going on here?
I understand that you guys vote for like a month in a row or something, right?
Yeah, it's about a month that three phases of elections will be held.
And can you explain, sort of thumbnail sketch, who are the different factions vying for power there and how things are going?
Well, there are two major factions.
One is the grand old party like we have the Indian National Congress, which is led by Sonia Gandhi, the widow of Rajiv Gandhi.
And their candidate for prime minister is the one we have now, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the economist, socialist.
And the other is the Hindu Nationalist Party, the BJP Bharatiya Janata Party, the Indian People's Party, translated.
They are the two main factions.
And we have a ragtag bunch of other parties called the Third Front.
There are communist parties, regional parties and so on.
And now this guy, Advani Modi, he's the leader or presumed leader of the BJP, is that right?
Yeah, that's right.
All right.
So I guess you say the regional parties and the communist parties, their effect is, I guess, more localized.
And the two real competing centers of power for control over the national government are the socialists and this BJP, right?
That's right.
But actually, the thing is that this time around, even the Congress and the BJP are well localized because there is no real all India party anymore.
That situation has changed completely.
You know, for about 50 years, India is about 60 years old now as a free country.
And for about 50 odd years, we've had a one party dominant system.
And the one party that was dominant throughout India was the Congress Party.
And almost never in our history has any other party been able to take control of power at the center.
But right now, the situation has changed dramatically.
And there is actually no national issue.
There is no national party at all left in the country.
So everybody's here.
And for the last two terms in office, there have been coalitions.
And they are expecting another coalition this time.
And that is the current situation.
I see.
So the power is really spreading out that there is no party that can gain a majority by itself, only in plurality, I guess.
There is no party like that at all.
I see.
Well, now, let's talk about the BJP a little bit here first.
I believe in your blog, you kind of refer to these guys as being against all outsiders, sort of a very xenophobic, chauvinistic party.
They've been referred to before as fascistic.
And supposedly their leader once praised Adolf Hitler or something.
Who knows about accusations like that?
But can you, you know, fill us in the real details there about who these guys are, what they really represent?
Well, they are, in my opinion, fascistic.
They represent something that is actually antithetical to the Constitution, that we are supposed to be a secular country and they are religious.
They mix religion and politics and they are Hindu nationalistic.
And wherever they have been in power or the noises that they make, even out of power, are against other minorities in India, like the Muslims, who are actually a minority, but the world's biggest minority.
There have been pogroms against Muslims.
There have been pogroms against Christians here, all led by this party.
They're a very ugly bunch.
Well, in fact, there was a pogrom against Muslims, I believe, in, was it early 2002?
That was just absolutely horrifying.
Barely got any press here, but it was more than 10,000 people killed or something, right?
That was in Gujarat and that is where they are in power still, led by Narendra Modi.
I only know about that myself, in fact, because I forget, one of these terrorism experts, probably Michael Scheuer, I think it was, mentioned on the show that this became a big issue for Osama bin Laden, that he pointed to it publicly in one of his statements and said, see, the Americans don't care about human rights, they only care about killing Muslims, and if Muslims get killed by Indians, they don't bat an eyelash, they don't say a single word about it.
That's the only reason I even know that the thing happened.
It's because Michael Scheuer brought it up in the context of, you know, a totally different subject.
Yeah, we are far away and all that happens here doesn't make news there, that's true.
Yeah, well, I mean, you would think...
But they have done it against Christians, too.
Recently, there have been pogroms against Christians.
What kind of results do you expect for the BJP in these current elections?
How strong are they going to come out of this thing?
Well, the news today, the forecast in the television news today, we have a house of 550-odd people and 550-odd seats, and they are expecting the Congress to get 160 and the BJP to get about 100.
Okay, so their guy is not likely to be the Prime Minister next time, at least.
Is that it, or the President?
Well, we don't know whether the Congress will really get 160.
I, for one, sincerely doubt it.
And even if they get less, let's say both the BJP and the Congress get a little above 100, the key will be the post-poll coalitions, what they are calling, the post-poll understandings that who can garner how many other parties to support it.
And then, you know, we have the system of parliamentary democracy, so from the Parliament, the ruling coalition will emerge.
And that is what we expect.
I see.
Well, and one of the things that, I guess, sort of goes part and parcel with the power of the BJP, I guess, as you say, they're going to be, one way or another, a very important faction in the next government there.
What little I know about them says that their idea of how to respond to things like the Mumbai attack would be a far more militant-type reaction, risking actual war with Pakistan, rather than working with their police agencies to hold trials and so forth, like is going on now.
Is that one of the issues of the election, is that the BJP says that the socialists are kind of soft on terrorism and they've got to have a strong man in there who's willing to, you know, act like George Bush or whatever?
Yeah, the BJP, of course, makes the warmongering a very big key plank in its campaigning.
Yeah, there are some warmongering noises coming out of them, yeah.
And is that something that you worry about, that their influence growing could actually substantially increase the risk of war with Pakistan?
Well, I'm not so sure that this warmongering is realistic, or whether they're just making noises to keep the people happy.
Because Pakistan right now is in a very, very troubled state.
Half the country is now under the Taliban, and the Pakistan state is, you know, half army, which most of the people don't like, and then whatever little democratic forces they have are very weak.
So I don't really see war as an option, realistic option.
But you never know these guys.
They're all a bunch of loons, actually, in my opinion.
Yeah, the politicians on both sides, you mean?
Well, I don't know about their side, because they are very weak on their side.
They don't really have politicians as such in Pakistan.
Not that ours are really politicians in that sense.
But in our case, somebody wrote a nice comment on my blog the other day, what we call politics in India is actually real politics, what is going on.
It is a kind of skullduggery and Machiavellianism and this kind of thing.
Meaning there's a lack of pretense about it, it's all simply spoils and power?
Absolutely.
There is no philosophy, there is no thinking, there is no clarity, and it's all about jockeying for power, the loaves and fishes of office.
Yeah, that's the situation.
Well, I'm glad to see that it sounds like you think that the reasonable argument against any kind of real full-scale conflict between India and Pakistan actually will carry the day, or you seem to more or less default that way, huh?
Yeah, that's what I think.
That's good.
I mean, my premise for examining my own government here in America, oftentimes has got to take into account the possibility that they really are as crazy or stupid as they appear, and they might do these completely irrational things anyway.
Although I guess it depends on a case-by-case basis how much to let yourself worry about those kind of things.
Yeah, you are anti-war.com, I know that.
And here the situation is troubled, it is definitely troubled.
You never know what can happen, you never know.
These guys are really crazy.
Do you know much about the policy of India inside Afghanistan?
I read reports that say Hamid Karzai is pretty close to the Indian government, and that in fact there are even Indian bases inside Afghanistan, is that right?
Do you know?
I haven't heard of Indian bases, but there definitely is Indian support to the Karzai government.
We are building a road from Afghanistan to the sea.
I think it goes via Iran.
But I haven't heard of real bases, yeah.
And now, what about the Mumbai attack and the blowback, the consequences from that?
So far the Indian government actually has done more along the lines of what George Bush should have done, which is treat the thing like a crime, try to minimize it rather than blowing things all out of proportion.
Is that holding out for them?
Is that working?
Well, see, I have a different take on this.
Bombay is a very big city, I think its population is more than 10 million.
And these 10 or 20 guys came in and killed more than 200 people.
The only reason they could do that is because in India we don't really have the right to bear arms.
And if the public were armed, I'm sure this could never have happened.
Well, in fact, you know, I remember news reports that said that the population was using the internet, blogs and Twitter and Facebook and things like that to try to update the cops with information to let them know where the bad guys were and where the shooters were and where they could be cornered.
So it seems like what you're saying is right, that the civilians, the regular population of the city, had access to these people long in advance of the government, were close to them, and yet were completely defanged, unable to do anything to protect their own lives.
That's true, in fact, I read that there were people throwing stones at these guys who were armed with AK-47 and AK-56 rifles.
People were throwing stones.
You know, this is a country where the government is scared to arm the people.
And this shows something, doesn't it?
Yeah, well, you know, the flip side of that is our government isn't worried about an armed population at all because we'll let them get away with blue-bloody murder no matter what.
So I guess you can at least be thankful that they're worried about what you might do if you were armed.
Yeah, that's true.
But I think the right to bear arms is an important issue here.
And, you know, in India, a licensed weapon is extremely expensive, extremely difficult to get.
And there is a huge industry, I mean an illegal arms industry, making country-made weapons, and that's the situation here.
And if arms were cheaper and easier to get, I'm sure many of these localized terrorism activities could be controlled by the people themselves.
Well, now, here's something.
I'm looking at your blog, and I'm thinking, I can't believe this.
This is wonderful.
You know, exactly my brand of libertarianism from a little town called Goa, India, which I have no idea where that is except somewhere on the continent, a little subcontinent of India there, not so little.
And you're straight out of the Austrian school.
You're a Rothbardian individualist, is that right?
That's right.
Proud to be so.
And so how much influence is there of modern American libertarian thought in India besides you?
I'm dying to know.
Well, we have two libertarian think tanks in India, the Center for Civil Society and Liberty Institute.
Both have been working for more than a decade now.
So there is a growing influence, let's put it that way.
And since the opposition that we have, all these major parties, these goons, they have no ideology, they have no philosophy.
As I said, there is no politics.
It's all real politics.
I think our influence is growing by leaps and bounds.
Wow, that's just great to hear.
Have you ever written anything for Mises or for LewRockwell.com, I wonder?
No, I haven't, not yet.
Well, you should because I bet they'd love to have you and that would be good to kind of build some bridges between the libertarian movement there and the one here in the United States.
Yeah, I would love to do that, given an opportunity, sure.
How exactly did you stumble across Austrian economics and modern American style libertarianism?
Well, gradually I think.
I started as a writer about 15 years ago, convinced on the free market side.
And gradually I started understanding these Austrians, maybe about 15 years ago.
And it's been going on ever since.
Right on.
Well, again, I want to recommend everybody your great blog.
It's salvik-antidote.blogspot.com.
Thanks so much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
Great being there.